National Security Pick: From a Marine to a Mediator

Saturday

Nov 29, 2008 at 5:14 AM

Barack Obama’s choice of a retired general, James L. Jones, for national security adviser elevates another foreign policy moderate to the White House.

HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, was among a mostly Republican crowd watching a presidential debate in October when Barack Obama casually mentioned that he got a lot of his advice on foreign policy from General Jones.

“Explain yourself!” some of the Republicans demanded, as General Jones later recalled it.

He did not. A 6-foot-5 Marine Corps commandant with the looks of John Wayne, General Jones is not given to talking about his political bent, be it Republican or Democrat. And yet, he is Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, a job that will make him the main foreign policy sounding board and sage to a president with relatively little foreign policy experience.

The selection of General Jones will elevate another foreign policy moderate to a team that will include Robert M. Gates, a carry-over from the Bush administration, as defense secretary and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. By bringing a military man to the White House, Mr. Obama may be trying to cement an early bond with military leaders who regard him with some uneasiness, particularly over his call for rapid troop reductions in Iraq.

But General Jones will also be expected to mediate between rivals, particularly in dealing with Mr. Gates, who has his own power base at the Pentagon, and with Mrs. Clinton, who has told friends that she does not expect the national security adviser to stand between her and the president.

And while other generals, including Colin L. Powell and Brent Scowcroft, have successfully made the transition to national security adviser, the experience has sometimes been rocky, as in the career of John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral who fought an uphill battle during the Reagan administration to mediate between George P. Shultz at the State Department and Caspar W. Weinberger at the Pentagon before finding himself caught up in the Iran-contra affair.

Mr. Obama is expected to announce his national security team on Monday in Chicago, with Mr. Gates at the Pentagon, Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, General Jones at the White House and possibly Adm. Dennis C. Blair, who is retired, as director of national intelligence. What is notable is that none of them have a long history with Mr. Obama, and none are known to be particularly close to him.

Among Mr. Obama’s previous inner circle of foreign policy advisers, both Susan E. Rice and Gregory Craig crossed swords with Mrs. Clinton during the presidential campaign. Ms. Rice may end up as ambassador to the United Nations, but Mr. Craig will become White House counsel. Two others, Anthony Lake, a national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, and Samantha Power, a Harvard scholar and author who left the campaign after she was quoted as making remarks critical of Mrs. Clinton, appear unlikely to end up with top jobs.

At the time of that presidential debate in October, General Jones had spoken only twice to Senator Obama, most recently to brief him on Afghanistan before the candidate made his first trip there. By contrast, he had worked since 1979 with Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, and regarded him as a friend. On the night of the debate he had just given a speech to a mostly Republican group in Pebble Beach, Calif.

But General Jones has long been respected and admired by both Republicans and Democrats. He is fluent in French, which he once spoke better than he spoke English after living in Paris from age 2 to 17. He played basketball at Georgetown University, served in Vietnam and has received all manner of decorations as a marine, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters and the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V.”

At 64, General Jones bicycles from home to work twice each week, riding the nine miles from McLean, Va., to the offices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, two blocks from the White House, where he runs a task force on energy. Friends say he is a fan of Toby Keith, the country-music singer and songwriter.

In selecting General Jones, Mr. Obama has also picked a former supreme allied commander in Europe, a man who, at NATO, had to cajole, prod and bully recalcitrant nations. At NATO, he led the American operation in Kosovo. He served as the Bush administration’s envoy to set up an Israeli-Palestinian security model in the West Bank city of Jenin and has traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq on fact-finding missions for the Pentagon.

He has said the war in Iraq has caused the nation to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and warned that the consequences of a failure there were just as serious as in Iraq.

“Jones brings the same balance that Scowcroft did to the job,” said David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power” (PublicAffairs). “Not only does he know how to work the Washington system,” Mr. Rothkopf said, but “he’s deeply steeped in Afghanistan, which is going to be a central front for us.”

But what is unclear, Mr. Rothkopf said, is how quickly General Jones can develop a close relationship with Mr. Obama and how successfully he, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates can define their roles on issues like Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and terrorism.

Because of his physical proximity — the national security adviser works in the West Wing of the White House and consults with the president several times a day — General Jones will automatically serve as a counter to the State Department. But a State Department that is at war with the White House is the last thing that General Jones wants, his friends and associates say.

“He’s not the sort of person who is going to be chasing down whether Hillary went through him or not,” said one of General Jones’s friends, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He doesn’t have that kind of an ego.”

General Jones, friends say, gets along well with Mrs. Clinton and has even hired some of her former staff members to work for him on the energy task force.

General Jones approaches things in a “get it done” fashion, associates say, with a propensity to think tactically. Sometimes, that can rub people the wrong way. When he began working on the security proposal for Jenin, some Israeli military officials grumbled that he thought he knew Israel’s security requirements better than they did. Israelis also worried that he would seek to impose an international force on the ground to maintain security, an idea favored by many in the international community but that still leaves some Israeli hawks queasy.

But things have changed in Jenin, much of it thanks to General Jones, both Israeli and Palestinian officials say. The city that once sent waves of suicide bombers into Israel now has Palestinian security officials who have restored order.

“He was able to force all of the different parts of the U.S. government to work together to make Jenin a model of economic hope, despite a very dreary past, and so far, so good,” said David Makovsky, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He brought clarity to a messy situation.”

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